Nick Bilton apparently didn’t read my post last week, because he showed up for his new job at “60 Minutes” bright and early yesterday, ready to read some vague but think-y remarks Claude had prepared for him at a low fourth grade level to what he must have imagined would be a cowed, if not openly star-struck staff. What he got instead was Scott Pelley waiting for him behind the door with a baseball bat as Lesley Stahl smacked a fist into her palm and muttered “Yeah! Give him the business, Scotty! Fuck him up, Scotty!”
The meeting started at 10 am and the first tweet about it arrived from the Guardian’s Jeremy Barr at 10:32 am, because the whole meeting instantly leaked in 60fps Dolby Atmos 4k HDR to every working media reporter. Oliver Darcy dropped a special edition of Status recapping the kneecapping, as did Barr in the Guardian, Scott Nover and Liam Scott in the Washington Post, and Joe Flint and Isabella Simonetti in the Wall St. Journal.
The meeting only lasted fifteen minutes, according to Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin in the New York Times, which might sound short for an all-staff meeting with the new boss but I imagine felt very long to Bilton who spent it getting his rhetorical legs broke by “Slugger” Pelley. According to Status:
"Bari loves this institution," Bilton told staffers at one point during the highly contentious meeting. "She loves '60 Minutes.'"
"She's murdering '60 Minutes,'" Pelley countered. "She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she's doing exactly that."
Later, after Bilton tried to defer the blame for firing correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega as well as executive editor Draggan Mihailovich and former executive producer Tanya Simon onto the absent Bari Weiss…
…another staffer pointed out that it "takes years" to develop new correspondents for the program and noted that new correspondents would require training.
Bilton pushed back, saying "these are not going to be new correspondents that have never done this before." The remark drew laughter, to which Bilton said, "You have no idea what my plans are, so I will present those plans to you. I will present them when the time is right."
“You have no idea what my plans are,” said the King, “so I will present those plans to you. I will present them when the time is right."
Bari’s other weasel in the meeting, Charles Forelle, kept telling Pelley to stop being “rude,” in case you were worried that smarm is dead.
"This is not actually productive," Forelle said. "This is not an interview."
"It's working for me," Pelley replied.
"Anybody came into our house—this is '60 Minutes,'" Pelley added. "I guess you wandered in expecting to read a statement off?"
After fifteen minutes of absolute shellacking Bilton finally fled, limping out of the room covered in tears and snot and mumbling “enjoy the bagels.” A message arrived later via carrier pigeon from a secure undisclosed location which read:
"I am not intimidated by—I have been a journalist for 25 years, Scott. I have sat and talked with incredibly powerful people... None of it intimidates me, OK? So you are not going to intimidate me in front of this group of people."
As of today:
More on this story: constantly until Nick Bilton gets fired, I hope.
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